Former MP to contest

Former member of parliament Vyas Deo Sharma at home in Lautoka. Picture: FELIX CHAUDHARY

FORMER parliamentarian Vyas Deo Sharma believes he has a lot more to offer the country prompting his decision to stand as a Fiji Labour Party candidate in the September polls.

The 50-year-old potential candidate said he had put his hand up in response to calls from the party leadership to take up the challenge at the election.

"The party needs me and if the party needs me then I have to answer to the call of the party and the country and put their needs, interest and welfare above my own personal one," he said.

"When I was a member of the House of Representatives in 2001, I did a lot for the party and the people that the FLP represented and I am ready to do it again if I get elected."

Mr Sharma said the FLP was working on a manifesto that would cover all the basic needs and desires of the people of Fiji.

"It is a document that will take this country forward.

"When the party was formed in 1995 and subsequently formed government in 2001, we had big plans for Fiji and were working in establishing a lot of schemes that the current administration has done and is doing but we were not given the opportunity to do so.

"We have learnt a lot of lessons since 2001 and the 2006 takeover and if the FLP is given an opportunity this year then we will continue the work we had set out to do many years ago."

In the 2001 election, Mr Sharma won the Vuda Indian Communal seat, taking almost 80 per cent of the vote from the incumbent, Vinod Chandra Deo Maharaj, who had previously won on the FLP ticket in 1999 but had subsequently defected to the New Labour Unity Party.